afandian

As everyone is sharing their favourite miniature artists I’m going to share Bobby Fingers, who makes the best videos on YouTube IMHO.

The Jeff Bezos boat would probably appeal to this crowd, although it is by not remotely miniature.

The web around the late 90s and early 2000s had some really sketchy stuff. I think the difference is that it used to be the sleazy underbelly. Now it's accepted as mainstream.

My local 'newspaper' website is chock full of scam adverts. The print version is dignified. The website people, somehow, turn a blind eye.

And I got an advert on Youtube this week using sexually explicit language to sell pills.

Feels like standards, and expectations, have really slipped.

I doubt that anyone knows 300 million people let alone that many Americans.

Agreed, I doubt that a mega-behemoth like Google or Microsoft could emerge in Europe. Especially not on a compressed timescale.

But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.

We need to remember how to operate without the Internet, and de-risk our dependence on it. Whether that's reducing the use of computers in our daily lives, or getting more open-source-software-runs-offline-on-my-machine.

We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.

(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)

What are the "AI gods" going to do in this scenario?

AI is about many things, but a big factor is enclosure.

I don't understand where the all the EU anti-trust and anti-corruption regulators are here. _Governments_ enforcing that you have a Google or Apple account to participate in society is transparently absurd.

This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.

It's been dark since the Grimms, and likely long before!

I just rewatched it (link in sibling link). It's mocking Farquaad, but I think is clearly meant to be taken as slapstick. Implying that torture is no big deal.

I was horrified by the literal waterboarding scene in Shrek. Granted it was a year or two before the USA started trying to normalise that form of torture. I don’t know what was in the popular consciousness in the US at the time. But it’s very spooky.

Children’s fiction has always had a very dark side though.

I imagine their maths is fine. Their objective is to tackle climate change through raising awareness. That happens at the macro scale.

Luddites were campaigning against child labour and dangerous working conditions, amongst other things. Pick which side of history you want to be on!

Yet here we are talking about the environmental impact of Microsoft data centres in NL. We wouldn’t otherwise be.

I'm sure there was some passive agreement involved, and probably some "politician's syllogism" too.

But the null hypothesis is that there is no new legislation to vote on. It must have come from somewhere!

You can survive and be exist in society without both.